FALSE SPRING: Who committed yesterday's murder?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2025

Are we nearing the end of a spring? This morning, we flashed on the passage from Hemingway's memoir, A Moveable Feast—his rumination about life in Paris in the face of that city's "false spring."

We'll reproduce a bit of that passage at the end of this piece. We'll start with the somewhat peculiar thing John Miller said last night.

Currently, Miller's a major figure at CNN. To his credit, there's nothing flashy about the guy, and he has an impressive resume:

John Miller (police official)

John Miller (born July 29, 1958) is an American journalist and police official. From 1983 to 1994, he was a local journalist in New York City, before serving as the NYPD's chief spokesman from 1994 to 1995.

In 1995, Miller joined ABC News, and secured an interview with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. In 2003, he returned back to law enforcement as a senior official in the LAPD and in 2005 as Assistant Director for Public Affairs at the FBI. Miller was named a senior correspondent for CBS News in 2011.

In 2013, Miller rejoined law enforcement as the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence & Counterterrorism under Commissioner William Bratton. Miller left the NYPD in July 2022 and in September [2022] he was hired as CNN's chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst.

Miller isn't inclined to shoot off his mouth. He tends to be appropriately cautious.

That said, he's very experienced in law enforcement, and he's highly connected. That's why we were surprised by what we saw him say last night, which of course turn out to be totally wrong.

Speaking with Kaitlan Collins, Miller offered this during the 9 o'clock hour:

COLLINS (9/10/25): So, is it clear if anyone is in custody right now? Or is the answer still no, based on what we know so far?

MILLER: Based on what we know so far, they have somebody they're interested in, who, according to my sources, when I last spoke to them, was not in custody.

But, in a case like this, you are looking for someone who has detachment and a lack of empathy, who likes to be in control.

The offender characteristics of the—of the assassin, sniper, are something that's been studied very closely, especially by the Secret Service, and it's someone who is methodical and patient, self-reliant.

In other words, Kaitlan, this is the kind of person who would have planned to get in silently, try to be invisible, take this shot, accomplish the mission, take the gun with them, and leave little evidence behind, which is why I think they're having a very difficult time getting started on this. This is someone who was a planner...

"This is someone who was a planner?" Miller almost seemed to be saying—well, here's what he actually said

COLLINS (continuing directly): And John, also, what stood out to me, from what we heard from officials earlier, was they said it was a single shot that was fired. It wasn't multiple shots in Charlie Kirk's direction. They said it was about 200 yards away from where he was sitting under that tent.

What does that tell you about the person's familiarity with firearms?

MILLER: That tells you that the person is not new to shooting, that they understood exactly what type of long rifle to bring, what kind of optics in terms of scopes and sights to have on that, what the windage was that might affect a shot from that distance.

This is someone who knew exactly what they were doing, and is probably known to others, and this may be working to the advantage of law enforcement as someone who has a long history in shooting. This wasn't an amateur.

"This wasn't an amateur," Miller said, having referred to what he's heard from his unnamed sources.

He seemed to be saying that this probably wasn't another 20-year-old man who was deeply depressed and was therefore significantly "mentally ill." 

To us, his assessment sounded highly speculative. But one hour earlier, on Jesse Watters Primetime, another law enforcement specialist had told Watters this, as reported by Newsweek:

Charlie Kirk assassination "had professional hallmarks": Security experts

[...]

Former FBI Agent Stuart Kaplan said the shooter likely put a lot of preparation into the attack, telling Fox News' Jesse Watters: "This assassination, different to the attack [on Trump] back in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a very well planned, very well orchestrated plot that was put in motion days before.

"This individual had a plan of escape to elude detection of being out on a rooftop, and also being able to evade and elude law enforcement," added Kaplan. "This assassination of Charlie Kirk to me is indicative of a professional hit, and I'm not so sure we are quickly going to be able to apprehend this individual without some luck."

Kaplan said it had the feel of "a professional hit." 

On New York City's Fox 5, a different specialist offered a similar speculation. Here's more from the Newsweek report:

Former Republican New York State Senator and Homeland Security adviser Michael Balboni made a similar point, telling Fox News: "It's an incredibly chaotic scene on a college campus. Hundreds and hundreds of people there, right immediately afterward.

He added: "That a rifle sound...was heard, and yet nobody was able to identify an individual, which most likely means that the individual was shooting from concealment and maybe had some way to suppress or to hide the flash of the gun, and again, indicating that this is a sophisticated individual.

"One shot hitting the target from 200 meters away and then escaping without anybody seeing them—those are the hallmarks of a professional." 

It seems to us that those speculations are based on fairly limited evidence. But Miller had offered a similar assessment, and he's a thoroughly sober judge.

Is it possible that the person who committed this murder was a professional assassin? Everything is always possible, though some people—inevitably, Watters among them, on The Five—had seemed to leap to instant conclusions concerning the motive of the person who committed this murder.

It may turn out that the person in question was another disturbed young (or older) man. It may turn out that he was an amateur—that he wasn't a professional at all, that his instant escape was pure luck.

Then again, professional assassins are hired by someone, for that person's purpose, and the possibilities there would be endless. 

Like Watters, we ourselves don't know who might have committed this crime, or why he might have done that.  Unlike Watters, we'd be inclined to wait until we all (may) get to find out.

Meanwhile, no one was a bigger winner in this disaster than the peace-seeking Vladimir Putin. 

He's been staging a long gamble in which the western world's form of democracy won't be able to sustain itself under modern arrangements. Yesterday's murder undermines the ability of this flailing nation to continue a famous experiment:

That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

At Gettysburg, that was Lincoln's prayer. Two years later he himself was shot and killed by an enraged fellow citizen.

Putin isn't an amateur. As of yesterday, he was invading Polish air space, and one of his lackeys was openly threatening Finland's existence.

He won't get tired of all the winning.! That said, yesterday's murder was his latest win as he proceeds with his gamble that our form of government won't be able to survive the information wars which have now emerged from the "democratization of media"—from the new arrangements in which, to borrow from Huey Long, it's "every flyweight a king."

We've been coming undone for a long time now. We started telling you that long ago.

We Blues insist that it's still 1898—pr 1955, or 1619. This angers the Reds you see on Fox & Friends Weekend, and they start chanting Communist Communist Communist Communist and also "lunatic left."

Was our species made for this type of work, or will we return to rule by strongman? We can't answer that question, but we'd say the signs aren't real good.

For the record:

You aren't allowed to shoot and kill someone because you don't like his politics or his way of pursuing his politics. Also, you aren't allowed to shoot and kill someone because somebody paid you to do that.

We don't know who murdered Charlie Kirk, but you aren't allowed to do that. We flashed this morning on Hemingway's passage about life in Paris in the early days, but also about what he called the "false spring:"

With so many trees in the city you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

It was like a young person had died for no reason. 

We don't know who committed yesterday's crime. But given the way we're going now, might our handful of centuries of fitful self-government turn out to have been a false spring?

Later in that striking memoir: Later in that striking memoir, with the stunning reversal in its last few pages:

Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring...

 

WEDNESDAY: We heard the news today, oh boy...

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2025

It arrived in several parts: As we walked home from the subway stop subsequent to a medical event, we were thinking about what President Trump had said. 

More specifically, we were thinking about what he said in the aftermath of the Russian drone excursions into Poland. It was, indeed, a "head-scratching reply." The Truth Social post says this:

Truth Details

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!

That was the entire post.

We were also thinking about what he said to President Macron, recorded through an open mike, a few days after the Alaska summit. We think it's the most revealing thing we've ever heard an official say:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

By now, it seems clear that the president's assessment was wrong, possibly trending toward delusional. Everyone else in the world thought they had already known that.

Had we ever seen a public official make such a revealing remark? In person, probably not—but we thought of the passage in President Clinton's memoir where he says how much he liked and admired the Arkansas Pentecostals, even though they were disinclined to vote for him.

The ability to like (and admire!) those with whom you disagree? Formulated slightly differently, we've referred to something similar as the ability to "pity the child."

When we got home, we heard the news—that Charlie Kirk has been shot. We thought of the portrait Gene Brabender drew:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.

And just this minute, we see the next news—the news that Kirk has now died. "They perish. They cannot be brought back." 

So Yevtusheno said.

As this latest death has been imposed on the world, Putin has seemed to surrender his pose. In the aftermath of the president's odd Truth Social post, we must wonder, with concern and with fear:

What might be coming next?

We suggest that we all learn to pity the child. "Their fate is like the chronicle of planets," Yevtushenko said. 

What the earlier president said: Part of the much longer passage from Bill Clinton's book:

PRESIDENT CLINTON (page 251): Far more important than what I saw the Pentecostals do were the friendships I made among them. I liked and admired them because they lived their faith. They are strictly anti-abortion, but unlike some others, they will make sure that any unwanted baby, regardless of race or disability, has a loving home. They disagreed with me on abortion and gay rights, but they still followed Christ’s admonition to love their neighbors.

[...]

Knowing the Pentecostals has enriched and changed my life. Whatever your religious views, or lack of them, seeing people live their faith in a spirit of love toward all people, not just your own, is beautiful to behold. If you ever get a chance to go to a Pentecostal service, don’t miss it.

Some will disagree with the logic of what Clinton said. They deserve to be heard from too. 

NORMAL AND NOT: This morning, we saw Blue America die!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2025

It happened on Morning Joe: We apologize for briefly returning to a certain famous text. But in Book VI of the Iliad, Hector, the noble Trojan prince, gives voice to a chilling prophecy.

He's speaking to his sister, Cassandra. According to Greek mythology, it was she who was "fated by [Apollo] to utter true prophecies but never to be believed."

This time, it was her brother, Hector, who spoke:

"The day will come when sacred Troy must die."

So the noble Prince Hector said.

This morning, we ourselves had the misfortune of seeing, with something resembling a startling clarity, that our own sacred Blue America seems to be fated to die. We saw it as watched the first hour of Morning Joe, and then as we gaped at fifteen more minutes after that.

Several ironies obtain. One irony would be this:

On average, the smartest discussions in all of American cable news take place during Morning Joe's first hour. More specifically, we refer to the discussions of world affairs which routinely take place at that time.

Typically, those discussion involve Richard Haass, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Washington Post's deeply experienced David Ignatius. 

Back in February, Admiral Stavridis "shifted his flag," leaving NBC for CNN, where he now serves as senior military analyst. Despite his unfortunate absence from Morning Joe, the program's serious conversations continue.

They're easily the smartest conversations in daily cable news. The existence of these serious discussions has created one of the several sick pleasures available to the "cable news" watcher—the chance to see a never-ending assortment of flyweights, stumblebums, dumbbells and stooges over at the Fox News Channel as they batter the Morning Joe program around for its alleged major dumbness.

Frequently, the D-minus students support their claims through the use of videotape clips which have been edited down past the point of recognition.  We've often groaned at such ludicrous conduct. 

This morning, we saw the worm turn.

We refer to the way the Morning Joe gang ignored the elephant in the room—the news event which was being  discussed when we briefly flipped over to Fox & Friends at 6:06 a.m. It's had to be dumber than the Fox & Friends show, but Morning Joe accomplished that feat today by an enormous margin.

The regular friends were on duty today. One extremely dumb thing was said as we  watched—but Ainsley quickly stepped in to correct the groaner. 

Let's say the three friends' names:

Fox & Friends: September 10, 2025
Lawrence Jones: co-host, Fox & Friends
Ainsley Earhardt: co-host, Fox & Friends
Brian Kilmeade: co-host, Fox & Friends

Steve Doocy has been dispatched, apparently for being too soft. But when we flipped over, the friends were discussing the remarkable news event which the New York Times was reporting at length in today's print editions:

A Fatal Stabbing on a Train in Charlotte Ignites a Firestorm on the Right

The video, captured by a security camera in Charlotte, N.C., shows a 23-year-old woman named Iryna Zarutska sitting on a light-rail train one night in late August, dressed in the uniform of the pizza parlor where she worked.

She is looking at her phone when suddenly, a man sitting behind her stands up, gripping a knife in his raised right hand. Moments later, the police say, he stabbed and killed Ms. Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in what appeared to be a random and unprovoked attack.

The police arrested Decarlos Brown Jr. soon after and charged him with first-degree murder. But the brutal killing did not capture widespread attention until the security footage was released on Friday, at which point it became an accelerant for conservative arguments about crime, race and the perceived failings of big-city justice systems and mainstream news outlets in the Trump era.

That's the way the news report starts. It didn't appear on the Times front page. Instead, it was a lengthy report inside the paper's National section—but if you were watching Morning Joe, none of this has ever occurred.

Full disclosure! The Times is already being criticized for the framework it dropped on these events. The criticism starts with that headline. For ourselves, we can't say that the criticisms are totally wrong. 

In our view, the report in the Times had clearly gone off the rails right here, in just the fourth paragraph of the lengthy report:

The outrage over the Charlotte killing is a part of a pattern in which President Trump and his allies highlight horrific crimes to bolster their case that the country is plagued by “American carnage,” as Mr. Trump put it in his first inaugural address, despite statistics that show crime is dropping. In Charlotte, overall crime was down by 8 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to the police, while violent crime was down by 25 percent.

We Blues! We instantly run to that "crime was down by 8 percent" framework. In other words, our instinctive reaction is this:

It was even worse last year!

That's our tribe's scripted reaction! Except on the Morning Joe show, where they talked and talked, then talked and talked, about everything except this event.

They talked about the Red Sox and Yankees—did so two separate times. Starting at 6:27, they burned a full seven minutes away with an inane discussion, full of convivial tribal laughter, about Mika's inane appearance on Andy Cohen's inane podcast.

(That foolishness involved an inane discussion about a pointless practical joke performed by Howard Stern.)

They kept burning time in such ways. We viewers even got to learn what Mike Barnicle thinks about Pedro Martinez!

Starting at 6:56, four additional minutes were burned away in an inane discussion about the way Siri's performance has allegedly flagged of late. Then it was on to the first excerpts from Kamala Harris' forthcoming book—a perfectly serious news topic, except on a morning when the program was working extremely hard to avert its gaze from the elephant in the room.

In fairness,  let's be fair:

The program had started with one of those serious discussions. After a few minutes of Red Sox chatter, the discussion concerned yesterday's attack inside Doha by the Israeli air force.

That discussion continued until 6:17. At that point, the serious discussion continued, switching over to this startling new topic:

Poland Says It Shot Down Russian Drones That Entered Its Airspace

Those serious discussions continued until 6:24 a.m. At that point, Mika teased a discussion concerning Howard Lutnick—but after a commercial break, the gang burned a bunch of time away, chuckling and laughing about that nonsense involving Howard Sterm.

The gang was really enjoying itself by this time. On this campus, we thought we were seeing the ongoing process by which our tribunes in Blue America have been working to let our sacred nation die.

As that New York Times report continues, so does that possible impulse. It should be noted, at this point, that President Trump has already said this about the murder in Charlotte:

‘Stop This Madness’: Trump Calls For ‘Vicious’ Law And Order After Charlotte Train Murder

President Donald Trump on Tuesday called for law and order to counteract the “senseless crime” infecting Democrat-run cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, where the president said liberal policies allowed a “deranged monster” to recently slaughter Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska aboard a train.

“We cannot allow a depraved criminal element of violent repeat offenders to continue spreading destruction and death throughout our country,” Trump said. “We have to respond with force and strength. We have to be vicious, just like they are. It’s the only thing they understand.”

And so on from there. 

We have to be vicious, just like [the criminals] are? That strikes us as very unwise.

That strikes us as an example of a possible disorder—one we Blues have agreed to ignore. On Morning Joe, the reaction was to pretend that none of this has even occurred.

As for the New York Times, its lengthy report about this killing was full of information. That said, the report also slipped away to this familiar framing—to this familiar plea for Blue America's death:

The idea that mainstream news outlets downplay crimes committed by Black people has become more of a talking point in some conservative circles in recent years. The critique has emerged even as liberal critics of the news media have argued that crime coverage by American news outlets is distorted by anti-Black bias.

In North Carolina, as in other Southern states, newspapers in the Jim Crow era often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality. Among other things, such stories served as a precursor to a white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898, in which at least 60 Black men were killed.

Sad. Our Blue elites insist on talking about what the deplorables did in 1898. We can't seem to quit this self-defeating practice, which seems to emerge from a desire to signal our own (non-existent) Blue American moral greatness.

We simply can't stop doing these things! Through these behaviors, we continue to light the way to Blue America's possible death.

This morning, the three friends had it right! A million very serious questions are raised by that murder in North Carolina. Could the talk about the Red Sox wait? How about all the joking around about Siri, and also about Howard Stern?

On Joe, they preferred to laugh about Stern. This was an insult to the American public interest. In our view, it displayed an instinct for the impending death of our own sacred Troy.

Some Blues will be inclined to insist that what we're saying is wrong. We'll then want to turn back to the birthday book. In fairness, that's an actual serious topic, until we Blues beat it to death.

Sadly, the impulse to fiddle while sacred Troy burns is the most normal thing in the world. In 1990, Professor Knox described the lesson Greek citizens drew from the Iliad:

No civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

After ten years, the Trojans succumbed to the weapons of Bronze Age war. The final line of the Fagles translation is this:

Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of horses.

Eventually, the more civilized Trojans succumbed to the weapons of Bronze Age war. We Blues seem to be looking for ways to lose an Information Age war, in which the weapons are vastly different.

Mika had a lot of laughs with Andy Cohen. So they said today, on Morning Joe, as our sacred Troy burned!

Final point:

It's no longer 1898. We need to stop hiding behind that.

Tomorrow: Whatever's next

TUESDAY: Colby Hall gets it right about Fox!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2025

But where are the larger news orgs? As we noted in real time, we thought Mediaite's Colby Hall took a giant swing and a miss over the summer concerning the Fox News Channel's "smart [and] funny" "prankster," the baldly disordered Greg Gutfeld.

In our view, Hall's assessment of that disordered "cable news" star could hardly have been more cockeyed.  This very day, though, extremely good news:

Hall is back on track regarding Fox in an extremely large way.

At present, Hall is listed as the founding editor of Mediaite. At present, the site principally serves as the place to learn about the weird behaviors by President Trump which Blue America's biggest new orgs routinely prefer to pass over.

Mediaite is also the site which produced this report. It's the kind of thing you'll apparently never read at the New York Times:

OPINION
Fox News Is Trying—and Failing—to Bury the Epstein Scandal

The Jeffrey Epstein story is everywhere: Capitol Hill hearings, newly unsealed documents, lurid details splashed across front pages, and endless dissection on cable news. It’s one of those rare scandals with genuine bipartisan reach—Democrats and Republicans alike want answers, and the public is riveted.

Unless, that is, you’re watching Fox News. According to a transcript search database search over the past three weeks, Fox has mentioned “Epstein” just 429 times. CNN clocked 3,668. MSNBC? 5,624. For a scandal this dominant, the disparity isn’t just surprising—it’s damning. The most-watched cable news network in America is barely acknowledging one of the most talked-about stories in the country.

And this relative silence seems far more deliberate than accidental. For a scandal that fascinates both Beltway insiders and the QAnon corners of the MAGA base, Fox has gone quiet. The mentions that do slip through are quarantined to non-prime time programs—the very hours where Fox has the least at stake. In the slots that drive ratings and revenue, Epstein barely exists.

In all honesty, a lot of things "barely exist" at the Fox News Channel! Meanwhile, major newspapers refuse to report or discuss the way this channel works.

It isn't just the news division at the Times, where the groaning misconduct of the Fox News Channel can barely be said to exist.  Until an initial stab last week, no columnist at the New York Times has been willing to report or discuss this topic. 

The same is true of the anchors at CNN and MSNBC, even as they themselves are routinely trashed on Fox News Channel shows, often in the most misleading and dim-witted ways.

To appearances, no one wants to tangle with Fox. That's another way of saying this:

As the American nation slides toward the sea, no one wants to behave like an actual functioning journalist.

Hall starts today with the Fox News Channel's virtual refusal to discuss the Epstein matter. He moves on to other topics on which Fox is plainly operating in service to President Trump:

Epstein isn’t the only story caught in the bargain. Take last week’s disastrous jobs report: a meager 22,000 new positions, with June revised down 12%. A brutal number by any measure. Fox & Friends gave it all of 16 seconds before moving on. Had Biden been in office, the coverage would have been apocalyptic...

Inflation tells the same story. Headline inflation hasn’t budged: the Consumer Price Index stands at 2.7% year-over-year, the same as July a year ago. Core inflation—what really matters for budgets—also sits stubbornly above target. Egg prices? Still staggering: retail cartons remain roughly 16.4% higher than in 2024.

But Fox, once obsessed with grocery store “crisis” segments and on-air displays of soaring receipts, has quietly dropped the subject. The problem hasn’t disappeared. Only the president has.

[...] 

In early July the network’s hosts invoked “Obama” more than 100 times in a single day but “Epstein” just twice. That’s not news judgment. That’s narrative management.

With respect to the mentions of Obama, "narrative management" is a major euphemism. What Hall is describing is pure propaganda. It's tribal and corporate propaganda all the way down.

Today, Hall offers quantifications. In fairness, there's no way to say how many times the Fox News Channel should have mentioned the Epstein matter, or that jobs report.

That said, something else can be obscured by the (highly valuable) quantifications Hall is providing. Mere quantification can't begin to inform the reader about how many of those mentions of "Obama" were mentions on the Gutfeld! program, where the little mutt we've already mentioned specializes in claims that Michelle Obama is really a man and her husband is secretly gay.

In short, the moral squalor of this squalid program can't be captured by numbers alone. Hall is providing a major service, but even Mediaite gives amazingly wide berth to the moral and intellectual squalor found all over that channel's most watched "cable news" pseudo-programs.

Last night, Gutfeld was his usual squalid self. We advise you to pity the child—to regret the accidents of upbringing and development which somehow managed to produce such a furious, squalid small man.

All that said, the problem remains:

The New York Times won't report or discuss any of this. Neither will the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal.

David Brooks won't talk about this. Neither will Nicholas Kristof. 

As we noted yesterday afternoon, David French took a first step just last week. We're waiting to be told that Bret Stephens has astonished himself by watching a few of the Fox News Channel's ugly, dim-witted programs.

Lawrence and Rachel won't talk about this. Neither will Nicolle Wallace, or any other CNN / MSNBC figures. 

This may result from direction by their corporate bosses. The silence is real all the same.

For those among us with eyes to see, the American nation is rapidly sliding toward the sea. The astounding misconduct at the Fox News Channel is a major part of the "night assault" which is creating this state of affairs.

The New York Times has devoted itself to reporting no evil in this major area. As for the Washington Post, understand this:

As we noted last Thursday, the Post disappeared the press event by the Epstein victims to an even greater extent than the Fox News Channel did. In short, various people are knuckling under in various ways. 

As for us in Blue America, we weren't able to see what was happening back in the 1990s and early 2000s during the wars against Clinton and Gore. Despite the brilliance we tend to ascribe to ourselves, we're still unable to see the ways we're being misled today.

Colby Hall has it right in today's report! More on the unreported squalor of Gutfeld and Gutfeld! will follow here at some point this week. Hopefully, that dimwitted squalor will start to be covered by the Mediaite site.

None of this is likely to matter, of course. Due to our failure to see what's before us, the undeclared war in which we're all caught may already have been won.

NORMAL AND NOT: It seems to be "not normal" now!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2025

It's plainly the norm over time: For better or worse, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is promoting a book.

Last night, she appeared on the Fox News Channel's Special Report in connection with that effort.

Fox News Digital offers this news report about her interview on that program with Bret Baier. At one point, Justice Barrett seemed to be rolling along on a smooth, level road. 

As you can see at Mediate, she'd given voice to these fully conventional thoughts:

JUSTICE BARRETT (9/8/25): The genius of our Constitution—and I talk about this in the book when I describe originalism, I describe our written Constitution—is that it’s written at varying levels of generality. 

So sometimes it’s very specific. The president has to be at least 35 years old. But sometimes it’s very general. We’re protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. We have freedom of speech. And to have freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you have only to pass out pamphlets in a town square. I mean, it means you have freedom to be on broadcast news.

So the Justice said—but let the word go forth to the nations! At that point, she encountered what some may view as a somewhat peculiar question:

BAIER (continuing directly): Right. And the 22nd Amendment says you can only run for office for two terms.

BARRETT: True.

BAIER: You think that that’s cut and dry?

There's no such thing as a stupid question, Teacher always said. But to our ear, that question from Baier did seem to be a bit odd.

Can a president run for more than two terms? The anchor's inquiring mind wanted to know! 

Was Justice Barrett surprised by the question? Watching the tape, you can decide—bit here's what she said in reply:

BARRETT (continuing directly): Well, you know, that’s what the amendment says, right? You know, after FDR had four terms, that’s what that amendment says.

Baier moved on from there.

For the record, FDR died in April 1945. He actually served less than three months of his fourth term.

Still, he had run and won four times. The 22nd amendment was a reaction to that. Many people will think that Justice Barrett described what the amendment actually says—but maybe you never quite know!

Why in the world did Baier ask that particular question? We can't read the gentleman's mind, but now we turn to what Cleta Mitchell has recently said.

Who the heck is Cleta Matchell? She used to be a contender! In fact, she's been a key insider for quite a long time. The good book says this about that:

Cleta Mitchell

Cleta B. Deatherage Mitchell (born September 16, 1950) is an American lawyer, former politician, and Republican elections activist. Elected in 1976, Mitchell served in the Oklahoma House of Representatives until 1984, representing District 44 as a member of the Democratic Party. In 1996, she registered as a Republican. Since then, she has worked as a Republican lawyer and activist focused on elections, asserting, without evidence, that Democrats win elections only by cheating.

After Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Mitchell aided Donald Trump in his efforts to overturn the election results and pressure election officials to "find" sufficient votes for him to win. After participating in a telephone call in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to alter the election results in Georgia (which was won by Biden), Mitchell resigned as a partner at Foley & Lardner. In 2021, she set up an escrow fund to funnel money to companies conducting a pro-Trump "audit" into Arizona's 2020 election. 

[...]

She has served as legal counsel for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Rifle Association of America. She has represented Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC), Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), and Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK).

She is on the boards of numerous conservative organizations, including the Bradley Foundation which has given $6.5 million to Project Veritas, the National Rifle Association (NRA) (where she has also been a lawyer), and the Republican National Lawyers Association, of which she is a former president. As a board member of the American Conservative Union (ACU), Mitchell played a major role in efforts to expel GOProud (a pro-gay rights Republican group) from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a major annual right-wing convention organized by the ACU...

And so on from there. She started out as a Democrat, but given how way leads on to way, she became a highly placed Republican of the highly "conservative" kind. 

Mitchell has long been a very big deal. She was even part of President Trump's famous phone call to Georgia in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Today, Mitchell isn't exactly "back in the news," but she possibly should be. 

We turn again to Mediaite for a bit of slightly peculiar news. Last Tuesday, Mitchell appeared on the little-known podcast, Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.

Michael Luciano reports:

Lawyer Who Helped Trump Try To Overturn Election Says He May Use ‘Emergency Powers’ To Take Control of Elections

A lawyer who helped President Donald Trump try to overturn the 2020 election claimed the president can “exercise some emergency powers” to wield authority over elections, which are a state matter.

[...]

Last week, she appeared on Washington Watch, where she vaguely claimed that Trump could invoke emergency powers to take control of elections.

“The president’s authority is limited,” Mitchell said. “The chief executive is limited in his role with regard to elections, except that where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States, as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have, then I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.”

Mitchell seems to have spotted another threat to national sovereignty! Meanwhile, say what?

In response to that threat, the sitting president may be "thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward?” That's what Mitchell said! 

To see the full hour of Washington Watch, you can just click here. At this site, we would pair Mitchell's fuzzy claim with Baier's unusual question.

Within Blue America, it's no longer unusual to see observers suggest that midterm elections may not even happen next year. Meanwhile, Baier could only have had the current president in mind when he inquired about a possible third term.

Until recently, such thoughts and speculation would have been very much "not normal." That said, what's abnormal within a more recent time frame may turn out to be extremely normal within the vast sweep of human history.

We may revisit the Scythians tomorrow. Once again, here's what the good book says:

Scythians

The Scythians or Scyths, also known as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranic equestrian nomadic people who migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia, where they remained until the 3rd century BC.

Skilled in mounted warfare, the Scythians displaced the Agathyrsi and the Cimmerians as the dominant power on the western Eurasian Steppe in the 8th century BC. In the 7th century BC, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus Mountains and often raided West Asia along with the Cimmerians.

In the 6th century BC, they were expelled from West Asia by the Medes, and retreated back into the Pontic Steppe, and were later conquered by the Sarmatians in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC. By the 3rd century AD, last remnants of the Scythians were overwhelmed by the Goths..

The Scythians swept in from Central Asia. Thanks to their skill in mounted warfare. they became the dominant power on the western Eurasian Steppe. 

Eventually, they were conquered by the Sarmatians, then were overwhelmed by the Goths. In the annals of human history, it happens all the time.

We think of the fictional Carlotta Valdes in the face of such facts. She's the dreamy fictional figure who seems to hypnotically journey back through time, recalling all the deaths and all the conquests, in Hitchcock's famous film, Vertigo.

Human tribes have been overwhelming other tribes since the dawn of time. If we view human life through a longer lens, what seems to be "not normal" today may turn out to be quite normal.

Certain behaviors and longings may perhaps be bred in the bone, certain top experts have said. Conventional niceties may go away when the longing for conquest appears.

Bret Baier posed an unusual question. Cleta Mitchell gave voice to a rather "not normal" idea.

Is Blue America facing a "night assault?" We've asked, but you can decide.

Tomorrow: As normal as command of the steppe

MONDAY: On Fox News, she's the latest demon!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025

"Editing" what she said: David French has turned out to be a very strong hire by the New York Times.

Last Monday, his column about the Cracker Barrel logo dust-up appeared in print editions. Full disclosure—we thought he slightly misconstrued the nature of the dust-up, and pretty much did so throughout.

We thought he slightly misconstrued the nature of the dust-up. But along the way, he provided the type of service mainstream journalists rarely attempt to provide.

Good lord! French described some of the ways entities like the Fox News Channel generate a never-ending sense of grievance among Red America's voters. At one point, he offered this:

The Corporate Logo That Broke the Internet

[...]

If you had to sum up the mission of right-wing media in a sentence, it would be: Democrats are weird, humorless and evil, and they want to destroy your way of life. No distinction would be made between the Democrats and the far left—anything that any far-left activist does is automatically attributed to the Democratic Party—and so the Democratic Party has to answer for anything the far left does.

[...]

The process of stoking outrage has another effect: It crowds out the news cycle. Most Democrats I know would be shocked at how little the average Republican knows about Trump’s actual conduct and his actual wrongdoing. Republicans can, however, cite chapter and verse about left-wing outrages and left-wing overreactions to Trump.

That creates a reality where they simply can’t conceive of how any reasonable, rational person would vote Democratic or oppose the president and his policies.

So true! Let's consider those points:

On Fox, the owners of the messenger children search the globe looking for the dumbest thing any Blue American blogger or podcaster has recently said or done. On Fox, the messenger children then tell their viewers that this is what "the left" (or "the Democrat [sic] Party") currently says or does.

If one obscure person has recently said it, everyone on "the left" has said it! As French explains, that is intended to "create a reality where [Fox viewers] can’t conceive of how any reasonable, rational person would vote Democratic or oppose the president."

This practice goes on all day and all night—and you can't find a stupider practice. Possibly for that very reason, the angry messenger children—"the D-minus students" of whom we've spoken—seem to love to perform it.

Sometimes, the children are instructed to perform a different game. They will take a truncated quote by a well-known Blue American person and paraphrase the edited statement in a demonized way. That may be happening at the present time as Psaki is being aggressively demonized.

At issue is something she said back in May about President Biden:

Was President Biden suffering from some sort of cognitive decline during his years in the White House? We would assume that he probably was, although we aren't medical specialists.

(As you know, such occurrences are always a human tragedy.)

Did President Biden suffer a cognitive decline? We would assume that he probably did. This remains an overwhelming favorite theme all over the Fox News Channel.

Back in May, the New York Post reported what Psaki said about the cognitive matter. The report appeared on May 4. This is the way it started:

Jen Psaki insists she ‘never saw’ signs Biden had declined while she worked as press secretary

Former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki claims she never saw any signs of the ex-president’s diminishing mental acuity during her tenure in the White House, but agreed that aging happened fast.

Psaki made the shocking claim when asked about the previous administration during her appearance on the “Mixed Signals” podcast Friday.

“I never saw that person—not a single time, and I was in the Oval Office every day—that was on that debate stage,” Psaki said regarding Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June 2024.

Critics and allies both called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race over the nationally televised trainwreck.

In fact, that televised debate was a trainwreck for President Biden—but Psaki, the Biden press secretary, said she "never saw that person" during her time in the White House! On Fox, the messenger pigeons routinely cite that (tightly edited) statement as they create the latest person for their viewers to hate, and occasionally to threaten.

She said she never saw that person! That statement, tightly edited, is trashed as an obvious lie.

All the children behave that way; it's their route to their generous pay checks. They don't mention the rest of what Psaki said on that podcast that day. Continuing directly from above, the New York Post included that statement in their news report:

Host Ben Smith asked Psaki about the theory that White House staffers had covered up Biden’s mental capacity at the end of his tumultuous term.

“I think cover up is such a loaded phrase, but I also left in May 2022 just for the facts here, and I have seen Biden once since then,” Psaki shared.

The 46-year-old said she hadn’t seen Biden in person during the time critics were questioning the president’s ability to lead the country.

“I’m not a doctor, aging happens quite quickly,” she said. “Were things that people saw during that period of time that were similar to that or would’ve been in a category of that? I don’t know, possibly and all these books are gonna tell us.”

She left from the White House post on May 13, 2022. A bit more than two years would pass before that fateful debate in June 2024.

Assuming there was a cognitive decline, is it possible that it occurred or started to show during that two-year period? Isit possible that President Biden never behaved that way, within the White House, during Psaki's earlier tenure?

Stating the obvious, everything is possible. We don't know if Psaki's statement was accurate, but we do know this:

The messenger children at Fox never take a chance! You will never see them describe that chronology as their turn their weapons against Psaki, working to make viewers hate her.

Did Psaki ever see President Biden struggling in some serious way? We don't have any way of knowing, and neither do the children.

We don't have any way of knowing, but we'll remind you of this:

During the 2020 campaign, Candidates Biden and Trump engaged in two debates. The leading authority on those events describes those debates as shown:

2020 United States presidential election: Debates

The first, moderated by Chris Wallace, took place on September 29...Biden was generally held to have won the first debate, with a significant minority of commentators deeming it a draw.

[...]

The [second] debate took place on October 22 and was moderated by Kristen Welker. The changes to the debate rules, which included the candidates' microphones being muted while the other was speaking, resulted in it being generally considered more civil than the first debate...Biden was generally held to have won the debate, though it was considered unlikely to alter the race to any considerable degree.

Weird! Rightly or wrongly, Biden was widely held to have won the two debates back in 2020. Psaki was named press secretary in late November—roughly one month later.

As of her departure in May 2022, is it possible that Psaki never saw Biden in anything like the way he later seemed to be? He had seemed to win a pair of debates with Candidate Trump shortly before she began her tenure.

Is it possible that she never saw him as he later seemed to be? Presumably, yes, it is—and we have no way of knowing the truth. On the Fox News Channel, the corporate tools don't take a chance with that:

They simply refuse to tell their viewers about when Psaki left the White House.

If there was some such as terrible people, the various pigeons on the Fox News Channel would be truly terrible people. The same is true of the timorous Blue American journalists who refuse to tell the world about what the Fox News Channel does all day long and then on into the night.

In fairness, the pay is good and the hours are short—and the memorization is easy. The decision to engage in a cowardly silence seems to be amazingly easy too.

As in Dubliners, so too here! A type of paralysis is gripping our nation, but only on our own Blue American side. The fury is endless over on Fox. Over here, we're served by The Dead.

The gentle boy named Michael Furey died at age 17 from singing "The Lass of Aughrim." Our Blue American silent lambs are hoping to live forever. 

NORMAL AND NOT: It's "not normal," the governor said!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025

That's only one part of the deal: There it sits, even as we sit here typing.

We refer to the headline which sits atop Ezra Klein's (lengthy) column for the New York Times. This is the headline as it exists online:

Stop Acting Like This Is Normal

Stop acting like this is normal! Within the body of his lengthy essay, Klein is offering that advice to Democratic members of Congress. 

More specifically, he's trying to decide what Democrats should do as the latest government shutdown approaches. He says he isn't sure what the Dem should do—but along the way, he says this:

Democrats cannot pretend this is a normal Republican administration. They cannot ignore masked agents in the streets, armed troops in the cities, billions of dollars of money going into the Trump family’s pockets, an administration that spins off several scandals in a week that would have consumed other presidencies for years. If Democrats cannot make an issue out of all that, then they are screwed and so are we.

And we might be...

Democrats shouldn't pretend that this is a normal administration. If Democrats can't establish that point, then we're all screwed, he says.

He also says that we might already be screwed. Continuing directly, he offers this

And we might be. Even if Democrats could agree on a message, do they have the messengers? Have Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer distinguished themselves as able to win an argument? Are they going to hold the line as national parks close down, as federal employees are furloughed, if checks stop going out the door, if flights are delayed because air traffic controllers aren’t getting paid? I don’t know that they will. I am quite certain that this moment deserves real opposition—that Democrats, morally speaking, should not fund a government that Trump is turning into a tool of personal enrichment and power. But I am not certain that Democrats can win a shutdown—I am not certain that they have the leaders that they need. It is absolutely the case that Democrats could lose a shutdown, but whatever they’re doing right now, it’s not called winning.

In Klein's view, Democrats could lose a showdown over the impending government shutdown—but whatever Dems are doing now, "it's not called winning." They may not have sufficiently talented leaders, he says.

We agree with all that! As we noted all last week, we suspect that the current undeclared American civil war has perhaps already been lost by the various ineffective forces of our own Blue America.

The Achaeans are coming over the walls again in this, the latest iteration of the never-ending human "night assault." To our eye, we Blues don't seem to have the slightest idea how to react to this onslaught.

We Blues don't seem to know what to do about this "night assault." And as we've long noted at this site, it's been this way for at least the past thirty-plus years, dating back to the invention of the Whitewater pseudo-scandal in bungled reporting on the front page of that same New York Times.

First that pseudo-scandal, then the subsequent years long war against Candidate Gore! We Blues just sat there and twiddled our thumbs as the current era got its start in those early (and deadly) assaults.

All in all, we Blues have never been able to discern a key fact—like the townsfolk of Camus' Oran, we just aren't especially sharp. At any rate, there was Ezra Klein's new column, and we agree with that headline:

We agree! A whole lot of entities in Blue America need to stop pretending that the devolving conduct of this administration is some version of normal.

In particular, the conduct of the sitting president has increasingly been "not normal!" We derive that quotation from a recent remark which has been widely reported.  

The statement was made by Governor Pritzker (D-Illinois). Here's the way the mild-mannered (and cash-strapped) PBS reported what the governor said, via the Associated Press:

Trump says ‘we’re not going to war’ with Chicago after threatening city on social media

President Donald Trump on Saturday amplified his promises to send National Guard troops and immigration agents to Chicago by posting a parody image from “Apocalypse Now” featuring a ball of flames as helicopters zoom over the nation’s third-largest city.

“’I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The president offered no details beyond the label “Chipocalypse Now,” a play on the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s dystopian 1979 film set in the Vietnam war, in which a character says: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

[...]

The president “is threatening to go to war with an American city,” Pritzker wrote on X over an image of Trump’s post. “This is not a joke. This is not normal.”

Let's focus on the governor's key remark, which we post below. It echoes the Ezra Klien headline:

This is not normal

"This is not normal," the governor said. It's hard to dispute that assessment.

The crackpot post by the sitting president had a clear crackpot feel. “’I love the smell of deportations in the morning?" So the bizarre sitting president said, as he said that his nation's third-largest city was about to encounter his nation's Department of WAR.

In truth, extremely strange posts by this rather strange man have become as Americana as apple pie, in the sense of being thoroughly normal. We recall, for example, the recent post in which he weirdly showed President Obama being frog-marched away in chains. 

"Truths" like that have become the norm. Over here in Blue America, our greatest news orgs have tended to avert their gaze from this ongoing strange behavior.  You can learn about it at Mediaite, but not in the New York Times.

Nothing to look at, those orgs have implicitly said. With that in mnd, there is one thing which can be said:

With increasingly frequency, the president's behavior does seem to be "not normal." In his most recent post, he said he loved the smell of deportations—of folks being led off in chains as the city of Chicago gets ready to learn about WAR.

Something seems to be possibly wrong with this very powerful man. We've advised you to pity the child, but with respect to his frequent behavior, it doesn't seem to be normal at all.

Nor is it only the president. The sitting vice president keeps pimping out social media posts in which he identifies the things he "doesn't give a shit" about. That too is decidedly "not normal." But sometimes in the course of human affairs, the "not normal" has wracked up big wins.

The Mongols, the Huns, the Goths—the Achaeans? All have staged famously successful "night assaults." Meanwhile, how about the warlike but little remembered Scythians? The leading authority on their conquests gives us this capsule on them:

Scythians

The Scythians or Scyths, also known as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranic equestrian nomadic people who migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia, where they remained until the 3rd century BC.

Skilled in mounted warfare, the Scythians displaced the Agathyrsi and the Cimmerians as the dominant power on the western Eurasian Steppe in the 8th century BC. In the 7th century BC, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus Mountains and often raided West Asia along with the Cimmerians.

In the 6th century BC, they were expelled from West Asia by the Medes, and retreated back into the Pontic Steppe, and were later conquered by the Sarmatians in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC. By the 3rd century AD, last remnants of the Scythians were overwhelmed by the Goths, and by the early Middle Ages, the Scythians were assimilated and absorbed by the various successive populations who had moved into the Pontic Steppe...

The Scythians were overwhelmed by the Goths. At present, in roughly the same location, the Ukrainians are engaged in the long, slow process of being overwhelmed by the Russians as the sitting president delusionally whispers to poor Macron that his darling Vladimir wants to make a peace deal—indeed, wants to make a peace deal for him!

This administration's conduct is "not normal—or is its conduct perhaps as normal as the way we humans sleep and breathe? "Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world," sacred Camus writes in The Plague, "yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise."

As we start the week, we'll start by saying this:

We'd score Governor Pritzker's widely-reported statement as accurate. Sadly, we'd also say that many of his own assertions and behaviors will seem "not normal" to many voters—and we're  forced to say that such voters aren't exactly "wrong."

The "not normal" is general over the nation a this point in time. A "night assault" is part of the package—and we'd say that we Blues seem to be losing at present.

The president's conduct is "not normal"—but the same can be said of much of the conduct emerging from us Blues. In the eternally human manner, we Blues tend to have a very hard time seeing this fairly obvious fact about ourselves.

Our leading Blue American orgs won't report or discuss the way the president's troops are behaving on the Fox News Channel. Our orgs refuse to discuss the possibility that issues of "mental health" may be involved in this administration's various "not normal" behaviors.

By our assessment, the administration's behavior really is "not normal"—except in the way that such conduct has been a regular feature of human life here on Earth.  As for the conduct of us Blues, defeated  tribes have often behaved in the clueless ways we Blue Americans now exhibit—and then, the invaders have come over the walls and have wiped groups like the Trojans away.

Stop Acting Like This Is Normal, the Ezra Klein headline says.

In our view, that's extremely good advice with respect to major figures like President Trump and Vance and Bessent and Hegseth and Bondi and Bobby. (Tens of millions of fellow citizens disagree with that view.) 

In our view, that's good advice with respect to the current administration, Sadly, it's also good advice concerning the behavior of Us.

Tomorrow: What Governor Pritzker also said

THE DEAD: It's general over Blue America!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2025

The paralysis afflicting the dead: In Thursday morning's report, we detailed the disappearance of Jeffrey Epstein's victims.

On Wednesday, they'd held a high-profile press event in front of the Capitol Building. On Thursday morning, they were disappeared by the apparently reinvented Washington Post. 

It was as we told you! As we scrolled down the front page of the Post's website, we had to scroll through thirty-one (31) headlines before we were offered a link to the Post's news report about what these victims had said. 

In that way, those survivors had been disappeared. Just to refresh your memory, a few of those 31 news reports and opinion columns had appeared beneath such headlines as these:

What’s the best frozen pizza brand? Our taste test found a clear winner.

This foliage map tells you when to see peak colors across the U.S.

NFL primer: Can the onside kick be saved?

The health risk linked to scrolling too long while on the toilet

The Post had invited us to click on those links before the paper was willing to tell us what Epstein's victims had said.

Also on Wednesday, the sitting president had said the Epstein thing was a "hoax." The Washington Post seemed to take things from there—and yesterday, after we returned from participation in the "every third Friday" medical cycle, we saw that the Post had published this editorial, dual headline included:

In defense of the War Department
Euphemisms such as “defense” and “security” have a tendency for bureaucratic mission-creep.

Euphemisms distort thought, and no entities are more adept at producing euphemisms than governments. President Donald Trump’s rebranding on Friday of the Department of Defense as the Department of War is a worthy blow against government euphemism. Perhaps it can be followed by clearer thinking about the military’s role at home and abroad.

[...]

Trump’s opponents complain about the aggressive connotations of the new name. But the United States is protected by the most lethal and vigilant fighting force ever assembled, no matter what it’s called. The new name could prompt more focused debate about how to use it.

Etcetera, and so forth and so on. As workmen vandalized a Washington building, scraping the word "Defense" away, the Washington Post was reciting President Trump's talking points:

This latest name change by the president was part of the war on euphemism! It was designed to lessen the likelihood that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth would send us off to war!

This morning, we saw the same lines being recited by all three friends in the first fifteen minutes of Fox & Friends Weekend. Meanwhile, why do we call it "vandalism" when workers peel that silly woke word off the side of that building?  

Simple! It's because the president doesn't seem to have the legal authority to rename that department. By law, it apparently remains the "The United States Department of Defense," until such time as Congress decides to act.

To appearances, Jeff Bezos may not have enough money yet. To appearances, he's vandalized the Washington Post to keep his dream of additional wealth alive.

Meanwhile, who sits on the editorial board at this new Washington Post? Who wrote and published that editorial?

Perhaps that masthead information exists somewhere. Late yesterday, we searched and searched and googled hard and we couldn't find a list of such names. 

To appearances, a second war is currently under way. It seems to us that the forces of Red America may already have won. 

In part, it's been the paralysis. It's the paralysis and the walking death—the ongoing death-in-life. In all the squalor we saw last night after returning from our day in the medical realm, we were perhaps most struck by the new column from David Brooks, which ran beneath this headline:

Why I Am Not a Liberal

We've long admired Brooks' work over the past dozen years. Also, there's zero reason why David Brooks, or anyone else, has to be "a liberal." 

That said, it seems to us that he keeps doing this at this point in time. Every time he offers a challenge to President Trump, he hurries back to his study carrel and presents something, perhaps a bit performatively, which points in a different direction.

A war is on, and we Blues have lost, or so it can seem over here. In many ways, we'd chalk it up to elite "paralysis" and to elite walking death.

Over the past few years, we've suggested that we can possibly see the outlines of this war more clearly through the auspices of literature:

We can see the "revolt from below" in every verse of the Iliad, with the furious Achaeans having spent ten years trying to get Helen back. That leads to Professor Knox's account of what occurred after the war poem ends—his memorable account of what happened when sacred Troy finally fell:

Professor Bernard Knox: 
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war...

So wrote Professor Knox. That's part of his lengthy introduction to Professor Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad.

The Achaeans performed that night assault using the tools of war of the Late Bronze Age. The current night assault—the current furious revolt from below—is being enacted using the weapons of our own Information Age. It's happening as a paralysis is keeping Blue America's timorous elites off the playing field.

The Iliad helps us see the fury behind the angry revolt from below. Passages from The Plague help illustrate the way we Americans, of whatever political hue, have failed to see, failed to comprehend, what is occurring around us

Albert Camus, The Plague
The word “plague” had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor’s uncertainty and surprise—since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townsfolk. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that come crashing down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

[...]

Our townsfolk were like everybody else...they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions...

Camus continued from there. In his account, the fictional townsfolk of Oran weren't built to see the pestilence which was slithering in around them.

To the Iliad and The Plague, we would now add The Dead. It's the famous final story in Dubliners, the collection of fifteen stories which the young Joyce described in a pair of letters to his recalcitrant publisher.

The publisher was too paralyzed to publish. He wanted material removed:

JOYCE (May 5, 1906): My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis...I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written. 

JOYCE (May 20, 1906): I have explained and argued everything at full length and, when argument and explanation were unavailing, I have perforce granted what you wished...The points on which I have not yielded are the points which rivet the book together. If I eliminate them, what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country. 

Rightly or wrongly, the young Joyce—he was just 24!—said he saw his own Dublin as "the center of [an unexplained type of] paralysis." It was a "spiritual" paralysis to which he referred, though as we noted on Thursday, the very first story started with the literal paralysis which had led to the death of the late Father Flynn.

Joyce said he was trying to "write a chapter in the moral history of my country."  He said he hoped that he had "taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country."

As we noted on Thursday, the word "paralysis" sits right there, in the very first paragraph of Dubliners' first story. The famous final story is the near novella called The Dead.

Recently, we were called away to The Dead because of a delusional comment by President Trump—the delusional comment he made to President Macron concerning his darling Vladimir:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

Incredibly, that's what the president said. It took us back to Gretta Conroy, describing poor Michael Furey in Joyce's famous text—poor Michael Furey, who had died for her, long before, when he was just 17.

He had courted her, at age 17, by singing "The Lass of Aughrim." Her husband, Gabriel Conroy, had never heard this story before—but he was suddenly hearing it now:

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

With that, she told her husband the fuller story—a story he'd never heard.

Gabriel Conroy's paralysis lies at the heart of this final story. Joyce reveals it slowly but surely, starting when Lily, the caretaker's daughter, unsettles him with this sudden remark as he arrives at the annual Twelfth Night party thrown by the Misses Morkan:

“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.”

Lily's aim was true. Later, Miss Ivors seems to accuse him of being "a West Briton"—a Dubliner who may perhaps fancy the Brits. In the course of the story, Gabriel Conroy thinks about the literal dead, but walking death may perhaps have its eye on this decent man too.

In these times, as Blue America falls, it's the silence of the Blue American lambs where the paralysis and the (metaphorical) death can perhaps be seen. The observers in question are going to go to their cultural deaths without ever daring to say the things they all know to be true.

They're hanging on to "good jobs at good pay," to recall one of the sensible goals of the sensible Candidate Bill Clinton. They won't say what they actually think and think they know about the delusional President Trump, or about the apparent madness surrounding "Bobby" (and others).

In truth, they wouldn't know how to discuss the apparent illnesses which seem to afflict these men in much the way the Achaean leaders were driven by madness and rage. To appearances, neither their IQ nor their EQ equips them for such a task.

Gabriel Conroy's paralysis is subtly sketched by Joyce. He isn't insulted for his paralysis, but all through Joyce's famous story, hints of something like a paralysis are possibly shown to be there.

In ways those letters don't explain, Joyce wanted to liberate his country from the paralysis he thought he saw among his fellow Dubliners. As his story approaches its end, Gabriel Conroy's wife is asleep on their bed, her weeping having ended:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades [ghosts]. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live [without her].

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead...

He'd never felt like that himself, but Michael Furey had. Gabriel Conroy was himself among the walking dead, like the silent tribunes of Blue America who refuse to report what's happening around them and who refuse to discuss what they know.

They won't discuss the Fox News Channel at all, even though that's where that the troops are now coming over the walls. They refuse to say what they must think that know about President Trump, but also about such figures as Hegseth and Kennedy.

(As always, we advise you to pity the child.)

They won't report or discuss that channel at all. They won't say what they think they know about President Trump, who had the misfortune to be born to "a high-functioning sociopath."  

In the summer of 2020, the president's niece had written a challenging, best-selling book. Clinging to the rules of their guild, they continue to refuse to report what's in it.

"They were all becoming shades." So observed Gabriel Conroy, a perfectly good and decent person. 

By way of contrast, poor Michael Furey had insisted on singing "The Lass of Aughrim" in a cold, driving rain. Word of his death had reached the young woman who "was great with him at that time" roughly one week later.

He had never heard this story before. He sensed that something was missing or wrong.

Last chance before freeway: Don't cheat yourself of the chance to see Anjelica Huston perform that famous scene. 

"I think that he died for me," she says in the 1997 film. Unlike the confession to poor Macron, her assessment's aim was true.

"He was such a gentle boy," she says at one point. You won't see a lot of that as the Achaeans come over the walls, undiscussed, at the Fox News Channel. 

The Iliad, The Plague and The Dead. Do they help us see the various players with this war perhaps already lost?

BREAKING: It's the third Friday of the new cycle!

 FEIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2025

Gabriel Conroy's thoughts: Yes, it's the third Friday of the new and improved "every third Friday" medical cycle.

Despite that fact, we thought we'd be able to sneak away, at 10 a.m., to continue our look at Joyce's treatment of (metaphorical) "paralysis" and (metaphorical) "death." But given how way leads on to way, a minor, time-consuming complexification arose.

We do believe that Dubliners can help us contemporary Americans see ourselves as we currently actually are. We'll return to that task, most likely tomorrow, as we continue to ponder what Gretta Conroy's husband said, even if only internally:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

That passage appears two paragraphs from the end of the final story in Dubliners, the widely acclaimed near-novella, "The Dead." But what could we learn from pondering that internal monologue? 

Also, where's the (metaphorical) paralysis here in our own Blue American world? From the Blue perspective, the Achaeans are coming over the walls again, as they first did in the days of the Iliad. What can we learn from Joyce's portraits of his era's (metaphorically) paralyzed Dubliners?

We need to see ourselves more clearly. Sometimes we can learn to do such things through the intercession of books!

Also this: Hey! We're typing as fast as we can!

THURSDAY: The revolt of the furious students, on Fox!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2025

The furious gentleman's tale: Personally, we wish that Governor Walz would stop making unhelpful comments.

To appearances, the comments are meant to be amusing. They help the pro-MAGA side.

We also think that Blue America should be aware of the way the Fox News Channel is changing the shape of the public discourse within the "cable news" realm.

Yesterday, the furious children on The Five were unhappy with Governor Walz. Inevitably, resident silly boy Jesse Watters teased the program's second segment with this sad remark:

WATTERS (9/3/25): Up next, Trump's not dead—and Tampon is upset.

At this point, he doesn't even call him "Tampon Tim!" To this silliest of all American children, his name is simply "Tampon."

On the nation's most-watched "cable news" program, the gentleman's name is now "Tampon." When it came time for Greg Gutfeld to speak, the angry lad went with this:

GUTFELD: What can you say about Tim Walz that hasn't already been said in Deliverance? 

[LAUGHTER]

The guy is a creep. He is a blubbering eunuch.

The Dems really messed with America before Trump returned, but one of the worst things they did was introduce us to this—I was going to say "retard," but I can't say that—this asshole to a wider audience. 

We were so better off not knowing who he was. And now that we know that he exists and that he just plays to an audience, he's a loser and he's a scumbag.

The furious fellow couldn't say "retard." So he went with "asshole" instead!

Increasingly, the children traffic in news analysis of that type, in which the disfavored person is a retard, an asshole, a scumbag. In this way, as we've noted before, Gutfeld's unregulated fury is being transferred from his own gruesome TV show down to the world of The Five. 

Experts now refer to this sort of thing as "The revolt (or the revenge) of the D-minus students." They've been angry for a long time, and Fox is now letting them vent.

For the record:

The Fox News Channel no longer BLEEPS the analytical term, "asshole." On the brighter side, no one said that Walz is gay on yesterday's program, unless "eunuch" and Deliverance count.

This seems to be who these children are. This seems to be what they have.

Dana Perino laughs it off. She's there to create an impression.

THE DEAD: What might a modern "paralysis" look like?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2025

Plus, his strangest behavior yet: Way back in 1914, James Joyce's collection of fifteen stories began with thoughts of "paralysis."

The collection bears the sacred name, Dubliners. Boasting a youthful, first-person narrator, the first story started like this:

The Sisters

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

That's the first paragraph of the young Joyce's sacred first book. "Paralysis" is sitting right there, marked by its "deadly work.".

As it turned out, Father Flynn had died "a paralytic," felled by his third stroke. The paralysis introduced here had delivered him to the ranks of the (literally) dead.

Way back in 1906, the very young Joyce—he was just 24—had written to a timid, slightly paralyzed publisher, describing the intention behind his unusual book:

"My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis."

At any rate, the cycle of stories started right there, with the literal death of the literally paralyzed Father Flynn. It ended with the longest story in the collection, the near novella which bears this famous title:

The Dead

The young Joyce wasn't playing around, even at age 24!

As we present-day Americans seek to understand the death-in-life of our own failing nation, we might consider abandoning the 24-second news cycle which now defeats our understanding. We might consider replacing it with certain similarities which may be lurking inside Joyce's first published text.

Last night, the garbage was general over the Fox News Channel. There seems to be very little "paralysis" over there.

Within the elites of Blue America, the situation may seem to be different. Consider the headlines one can see, this very morning, on the web site of the venerable Washington Post.

A bit more than fifty years ago, the Washington Post exploded into major prominence with its investigation of the "Watergate" matter. 

It's a different paper today. This morning, at 7:45 a.m., these were the first ten (10) headlines seen on the front page of its web site. Each of these headlines offered readers a link:

The Washington Post 

Trump officials ask Supreme Court to quickly allow sweeping tariffs

Inside the Trump team’s conflicting efforts to mend ties with India

RFK Jr. drives a wedge between red and blue states on vaccines

The case of the stolen pigeons:
Chinese tycoons turned pigeon racing into one of the world’s most lucrative sports. Then the thefts began.

House GOP weighing bills to remove elected D.C. attorney general, overhaul justice policies

At D.C. Superior Court, a system up at all hours under Trump’s order

National Guard deployment in D.C. expected to be extended for months

Plastic exposure before birth can leave babies with lifelong fertility issues

What’s the best frozen pizza brand? Our taste test found a clear winner.
The supermarket freezer aisle is awash in ready-to-bake pizzas. We found a clear favorite.

This foliage map tells you when to see peak colors across the U.S. 
This year’s map forecasts an early arrival of colors in the Northeast, while the West Coast and Southeast may experience foliage delays.

In this age of the flooding of the zone, most of those headlines linked to serious news reports about actual news topics. The stolen pigeons and the best frozen pizza were possibly included just for fun. Plus the foliage map!

At any rate, there they sat—the newspapers top ten headlines! After that, as we continued to scroll, we encountered this array of eight (8) "stories" which offered us even more news:

More top stories

Texas moves to allow anyone to sue abortion pill prescribers, distributors

Death toll rises to 17 after Lisbon’s popular Glória funicular derails

Trump administration rescinds protected status for 250,000 Venezuelans

Trump ordered strike on suspected drug boat to send a message, Rubio says

D.C. can predict who will get into car crashes but can’t stop them

Heard on a hot mic: Xi and Putin discuss living to age 150

House Republicans form new subcommittee to reinvestigate Jan. 6 attack

Putin may live to 150? A Post subscriber may have to live that long to encounter reporting about the topic for which we were searching this day!

We'd now encountered links to eighteen (18) different news reports. At this point, as we scrolled on, we encountered a section bearing this name:

Latest from The Post

The section included eight (8) additional offerings. Two of the eight were these:

Analysis / Mark Maske 
NFL primer: Can the onside kick be saved? Plus, the top games in Week 1.

Analysis / Neil Greenberg
Predicting win-loss records for all 32 NFL teams

The count was now 26. After that came the day's "Better Living" section. Links were offered to four (4) more reports, not excluding these

Column / Ellie Krieger
Pear overnight oats show why this breakfast has stood the test of time

The health risk linked to scrolling too long while on the toilet

By now, we subscribers had been directed (or misdirected) to thirty (30) offerings. Now we came to another section. Its featured report was this:

Politics & Government

Judge rules Trump administration cannot withhold funding from Harvard

That was a perfectly serious topic. By now, our roll stood at 31.

As we'd scrolled down the Post's front page, we'd been invited to click on 31 links. Finally, we reviewed a set of six additional reports in that same Politics & Government section

This subset was offered in smaller print. Finally, though, we saw the topic for which we'd been searching. The link to it read like this:

Epstein accusers join lawmakers to push for full release of documents

At long last, there it stood! 

Yesterday, this event had been widely featured on two of the three major "cable news" channels. Perhaps a bit paralytically, perhaps driven by deference to power and by a bit of fear, the Washington Post had managed to squeeze it in at number 32 on today's play list:

That placed it below the discussion of onside kicks, and below the news report about the danger of excessive toilet scrolling. We've reported, now you can decide!

As decent people, we whispered a silent prayer of thanksgiving. We thanked the God of all Irish Catholics for the fact that the ambitious young Joyce never had to see this version of what might be a form of a type of moral "paralysis."

As for our youthful analysts, their souls swooned slowly as they heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. 

(We're borrowing from the closing paragraph of The Dead as we bring you that report.)

Yesterday, there they were, the survivors or victims—take your pick—of Jeffrey Epstein and Gislaine Maxell, a pair of convicted criminals. 

Yesterday, they told their stories in a press event outside the Capitol Building. On CNN and MSNBC, this was treated, throughout the day and on into the evening, as a major news event.

On the Fox News Channel—no paralysis there!—the various messenger pigeons found a different array of topics with which to fills their hours. Various targets were slimed again when Greg Gutfeld took to the air.

It was a major event on two news channels, almost wholly avoided on one. This morning, at the Washington Post, the event had barely occurred.

The New York Times did somewhat better. In this morning's print editions, the report appears inside the paper, on page A14. 

It didn't make the paper's front page. It's listed as the fifth of eighteen news reports in the online "National" section.

It appears right below the fourth report. As seen in print editions, here are the headlines in question:

Brewery Owner in Maine Joins Push to Unseat Collins

G.O.P. Leaders Thwart Epstein Disclosure Bill as Accusers Plead for Files

Accusers had been pleading for files, the headline said. Here's the headline which appears online, along with the opening paragraphs:

G.O.P. Thwarts Epstein Disclosure Bill as Accusers Plead for Files

With the Capitol towering behind them, several women who said they had been among Jeffrey Epstein’s victims shared harrowing stories of sexual abuse, pleading with members of Congress to demand that the Trump administration release all of its investigative files in the case.

Lawmakers in both parties stood behind them, vowing to keep the pressure on for the disclosures.

Even one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, said the files must come out.

None of it appeared to be enough to outweigh the pressure from Mr. Trump and Republican leaders, who have moved quickly to squelch legislation that would require the Justice Department to quickly and completely release what it uncovered about Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Momentum was flagging behind an effort by Representatives Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, to force the House to vote on the measure, after most Republicans who initially said they would back it fell in line with the president’s exhortations to let the issue die.

We aren't saying that report is wrong, though the BBC said that the "several" women were actually nine in number. We're saying that a bit of "paralysis" may have infested the treatment of this topic at the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, here's something you may not get to read about at the Post or at the Times. Under present arrangements, you have to go to Mediaite to learn about bizarre behavior like this:

Trump Goes on Bizarre, Digitally-Altered Posting Bender About His Political Enemies

President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of Truth Social posts featuring digitally altered videos of some of his political enemies on Wednesday night. The posts featured some of his favorite targets, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

After publishing boilerplate posts about the Social Security Administration and his meeting with the president of Poland earlier in the day, the president’s timeline got weird, even by his posting standards.

Intriguing! Just how "weird" were the president's posts? Was his bender really "bizarre?"

We're going to say that it very much was—that it was the most bizarre yet. Michael Luciano's report continues along as shown, but you'll have to click over to his report to actually see the apparent illness which might seem to be involved here:

The bizarre bender began with a post about Rosie O’Donnell, who moved to Ireland after Trump won last year’s election. (Screenshots of the president’s posts are posted below instead of embedded posts, as Truth Social’s embed feature seems to be non-functional with some content management systems):

“As previously mentioned, we are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O’Donnell’s Citizenship,” Trump wrote. “She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!”

This would be the last post in the series that included text. The rest were AI videos or videos that had been otherwise altered in some way.

They included a video of Schiff with an elongated neck...

And so on from there. 

The president had started with a suggestion that Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship might now be revoked. That was high sanity compared to what came next. 

You'll have to click to Luciano's report to see those altered photos. Incredibly, this is what the president has apparently posted concerning Senator Schiff.

Is something wrong with President Trump? We've asked this fairly obvious question again and again, noting that any such situation would of course be tragic state of affairs.

We've asked and asked and asked. You'll have to turn to the extremely strange visuals at Mediaite to encounter what seems to be an answer to that question.

"Silence invaded the suburbs," the poet Auden said, in honor of the poet Yeats. 

("Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest...")

Has a type of paralysis, in the form of a silence, invaded the Washington Post? 

Regarding the victims of Epstein and Maxwell, yesterday's open air presser had seemed to be a fairly substantial event. It was virtually disappeared by the Post, given somewhat limited play at the Times. 

More broadly, these newspapers refuse to discuss the possible state of the president's mental health, with respect to which we would strongly suggest that you look at the visuals which appear at Mediaite via the Truth Social site.

Our question:

Might we see portraits of our current Blue American selves in the page of Dubliners? In its final story, The Dead? 

Are we Blues possibly trapped in a form of walking death, in a form of moral paralysis? If we want to see ourselves more clearly, should we perhaps step back from the current news cycle? Might we try to look inside such honored writing instead?

Tomorrow: Additional language from The Dead:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.